When Everytown for Gun Safety published a map of recent school shootings since the Newtown tragedy it decided to inflate the numbers to include 74 shooting incidents. And just about every anti-gun media outlet decided to run with these numbers.

The only problem is that these numbers were drastically inflated to include completely unrelated shootings and now these media outlets, including CNN, are backtracking on the falsified data.

CNN’s backtracking was put this way:

After Tuesday’s shooting at an Oregon high school, many media outlets, including CNN, reported that there have been 74 school shootings in the past 18 months.

CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon — a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school. That works out to about one shooting every five weeks.

Some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which is backed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, headlined their graphic “School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook,” suggesting that the shootings it listed had a link of some kind to Sandy Hook — in which Adam Lanza killed 26 people at an elementary school.

It should not be surprising that the anti-gun group would falsify data to try to prove a point, but when major media outlets are blindly running these stories just because they fit a certain agenda it’s more than a little disturbing.

Journalist Charles C. Johnson exposed many of the stories that Everytown used to inflate their numbers and here is what he came up with:

“School shooting” at Brush High School, OR listed by Everytown was after hours, off campus, over a girl. Ban girls? http://t.co/PVT0uHbQvQ